This article was originally posted on my programming blog on Feburary 15th, 2020

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is awesome.

It gives you the power to use Linux within your Windows system. A Linux shell can be difficult to learn, but the payoffs are incredible. You can become insanely productive with it. I encourage every Windows developer to give this a try.

Early in my development career, I was a Unix/Linux developer, and I loved working with the shell. In 2010 I was thrust into the world of Windows with GUIS. There was PowerShell and some workarounds, but it wasn’t quite the same. While I eventually gained proficiency and speed at first, it was a drag.

The most significant advantage of WSL right now is improving productivity and bringing powerful Linux programs directly to your Windows desktop. So let’s try it out!

Install Terminal

So if you’re going to be using WSL and doing prompt things, Windows Terminal is pretty awesome. Let’s add that. Search the Windows Store for “Windows Terminal”

Click “Get” then “Install”

With Terminal, you can keep PowerShell, command line, WSL prompts, and more all in one place. It’s very convenient.

So let’s do some stuff!

The Basics

So if you’ve never used Linux before and want to know how to get around, you’ve come to the right place. Here are some basic commands you can use to get started.

Where am I?

You can find out where you’re at on the file system by typing

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pwd

Result:

Create a Folder

In Linux we call these “directories” and you create new ones by typing in

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mkdir (name of directory)

We’ll create one called “stuff”.

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mkdir stuff

Go into that Folder

Now let’s go into that folder by typing in cd (change directory)

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cd stuff

Now type in pwd and you can see we’re in the “stuff” directory.

Let’s create some files in that folder:

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touch file1.txt

The “touch” command creates an empty file with whatever name you specify. So now we have a blank file named “file1.txt”

Let’s create a few more:

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touch file2.txt file3.txt file4.txt

Now we have four files in the folder. But how would we know that?

Show all the files in a folder

We do that by typing in

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ls -la

ls is the command to list the directory contents, and the -la tells it to list everything, including hidden files.

We can see every file in the directory.

Let’s create a couple more files:

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touch testfile1.org testfile2.org testfile3.org

Now we run ls and see our added files.

But what if we only want to see the .org files we just created?

Choosing Which Files to Show

We do that with wildcards (*), if we only want to see the .org files, we type in

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ls *.org

The star means “everything,” so we want everything with a filename that has .org at the end of it.

If we only want to see files with the number 3 in them?

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ls *3*

You can place wildcards anywhere in the string, so it shows every file name with a 3 in it:

Pretty cool huh? What if we want to remove a file?

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rm file2.txt

rm will remove the file. If we type in ls we’ll see that it’s gone now:

Wildcards also work with rm. We can remove all those .org files we just created:

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rm *.org

Now if we run ls -la again we can see the files are gone:

Removing a Folder

So what if I want to remove this folder full of files I just created?

To leave the folder and go back to my home folder, I type

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cd ..

then type in

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rm -rf stuff

And that removes the folder. Easy!

Conclusion

So in this tutorial, we got familiar with WSL and how to use it. We did the following:

Enabled WSL

Installed Debian Linux

Installed Windows Terminal

Created a folder

Created empty files

Deleted files

This is enough to get started navigating and moving things around. We’re just scratching the surface of all the cool things you can do with WSL. If there’s enough interest, I’ll keep building more of these tutorials and expand on it.